The present invention relates to an information lifecycle management system for deciding a data management method in accordance with the value of data in business and more particularly to a system which previously defines a group of policy for associating the classification standard of data to be managed with the data management method applied to classified data and decides the management system of the data to be managed in accordance with the contents of the defined policy.
Generally, the information management system for realizing the information lifecycle management named ILM pays attention to the fact that the value in business of data to be managed is varied temporally in a series of lifecycle from generation to abandonment of the data and selects a proper data management method in accordance with the value in business at the moment on the basis of the previously designated policy to be applied, so that the data management cost in the whole system is reduced.
For example, when the policy that transaction data related to promising customers having a high utilization frequency in a last one month is stored in a disk apparatus having the high reliability is defined, the utilization log concerning individual customers is referred to judge the importance degree thereof while collating it with the policy and relevant transaction data is automatically moved into a disk apparatus having different reliability and byte unit cost, so that the total cost (containing an apparatus cost and an operation cost) of the system is reduced. The value in business of the data to be managed that is varied with the elapse of time is judged with reference to metadata accompanying the data to be managed and the contents of log data to be stored and various data management methods having different implementation costs are automatically used to thereby reduce the data management cost required in the whole system.
The policy that defines the application principle of the data management method to the data to be managed includes a condition part for narrowing down data to be operated in modification operation of the data management method and a command part for instructing operation contents. When the information lifecycle management is applied to a practical system, it is insufficient to describe only simple metadata such as data preparation time information and last access time information obtained from a file system or the like in the condition part of the policy and there is strong need that it is desired that the concept of business level such as the section of customers and the business classification of documents is used to set the condition.
Generally, as the granularity of the data to be managed is more detailed and the policy having more complicated conditions can be described, the data management can be realized minutely and efficiently. However, the unit of management of data is subdivided and the description range of the policy and the range of metadata and/or log data required to be acquired for individual data to be managed is expanded, so that the implementation cost of the information lifecycle management is increased.
The following are prior-art techniques deemed to be utilized for making it possible to define the policy at the business level and for reducing the collection and management cost of metadata and/or log data in realization of the information lifecycle management.
Rajeev Motwani, Jennifer Widom, Arvind Arasu, Brian Babcock, Shivnath Babu, Mayur Datar, Gurmeet Singh Manku, Chris Olston, Justin Rosenstein, Rohit Varma: “Query Processing, Approximation, and Resource Management in a Data Stream Management System”, CIDR 2003 discloses the technique that window conditions (restriction for the number of data resources, data generation time and the like) are set to data resources to be retrieved and the range of data to be retrieved is clearly designated for each query to be restricted. This technique is named “Stream DB System”.
Venky Harinarayan, Anand Rajaraman, Jeffrey D. Ullman: “Implementing Data Cubes Efficiently” SIGMOD Conference 1996: pp. 205-216 discloses the technique that a part of the common portion of the retrieval processing expected to be frequently inputted is executed in advance and the result thereof is held to thereby improve the retrieval efficiency. This technique is named “Materialized View System”.
Hector Garcia-Molina, Jeffery D. Ullman, Jennifer Widom, “Database System Implementation”, pp. 605-612 discloses the technique that a data format transformation program named “Wrapper” and a program named “Mediator” for generating data corresponding to higher-ranking concept from individual data are previously defined and the individual data is associated with the concept at business level to define the retrieval processing by using terms at business level. This technique is named “Wrapper and Mediator System”.
Even in any of the above three systems, the contents of the query processing applied to data body to be retrieved are modified in accordance with the contents of query inputted in the system, although the data body itself is not influenced.